Roger Ray, pastor
February 26, 2012 Lent 1
Mark1:9-15
9In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." 12And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.
14Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, 15and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."
When you adopt a child, there are certain moments of bonding that stand out in your mind. It isn't the filling out of forms and all the legal mess of adoption.... It is the moments of mutual understanding and connection.
I remember that 2 a.m. feeding when I held her in my lap in the moonlight and she took her sweet time finishing the bottle she had so urgently demanded as if she had to eat at that moment or face a sudden death. But she lingered over her formula as we looked at one another. And when she had finally finished, she reached up and touched my cheek, and in a moment of deep recognition, she said her first word, "Mum-mum." It was OK, I knew what she meant.
At the time of her birth I was very committed to eating a healthy diet. There was no red meat, no fried foods and no sweets in our house. But one day, when we were on our way to my family home in Kentucky, we stopped for breakfast in a little truck stop dinner, and in a fit of nostalgia, I decided to order the kind of breakfast I had grown up with.... Salt cured country ham, grits, biscuits and eggs.
I didn't expect her to like the hard, chewy salt cured ham which most people tell me has the taste of meat that has already spoiled, but from the first bite, she was an immediate convert.
She loved it and I was forced to exchange my breakfast for her bowl of oat meal as she discovered that my ethnic food was now also her ethnic food, doing more to seal the official adoption than anything that had happened at the court house.
We now keep a supply of country ham in our home. We don't eat it often but now and then, when you need to remember who you are, where you are from, what your roots are, we get some out of the freezer and fry it up, sometimes making those side dishes like "red eye gravy" which is nothing but ham fat with a little hot water added but ladled over grits, a biscuit and scrambled eggs can take you back to the old Ray farm in southern Kentucky where we are from.
Some literalists have challenged Valerie's penchant for an ethnic food that is not Asian but she patiently points out to them that she is from "South" Korea.... So she is a southerner at heart.
But truth be told, men and women, while our country ham meals are good for our souls, they are not all that good for our hearts. Realistically, no one should ever eat salt cured pork, but it is a part of our definition of who we are.
When salt cured ham found its way into the lives of my ancestors, there was no refrigeration, there was no freezer. We slaughtered hogs in the winter and cured the meat through the winter and though it grew a layer of mold on the outside, the salt preserved the meat on the inside for two or three years and so it was a part of what it took to survive during the pre-electricity years on the farm.
We don't need to salt cure meat to preserve it anymore but we do it sometimes as a kind of ritual of remembering. It has symbolic value that is greater than its nutritional hazard.
You know, most religious rituals have very practical beginnings. The kosher dietary restrictions of the Hebrew Bible made sense to the culture and time in which they were originated. The rules about agriculture and apparel served to preserve the Jewish people as an identifiable group in the mix of cultures in the ancient world and the ritual and dietary habits forged in a Palestinian wilderness helped to preserve their sense of belonging to that specific tribe of people.
For us, as progressive Christians, it is sometimes hard to tell when we need to preserve a tradition that has outlived its original purpose and when we need to uproot it because it has become unhealthy.
On this Sunday which, according to the liturgical calendar, is the first Sunday of Lent, the gospel lesson always repeats one of the gospel accounts of the baptism of Jesus. The season of Lent has functioned for many centuries as a time when people who were preparing to be baptized would spend time in personal reflection, penance and prayer to get them ready for the momentous moment when they are baptized.
We've never put any emphasis on baptism in our church. We have baptized an infant by sprinkling when asked to do so by the family and we've done an adult baptism by immersion when asked to do so, but we've never implied that anyone was either required to participate in this ritual or even encouraged to do so.
In the days before the Christian era, baptism had evolved as a kind of symbolic bath... it was a part of the rituals involved in converting to Judaism and certainly preferable to circumcision..... trust me on this one. John the Baptist appears to have been a part of the Essene movement which took baptism to the extreme of being a bath that Essenes may have observed as often as five times a day, believing that their personal cleanliness and spiritual purity, would hasten the coming of God's apocalypse.
Baptism was reinterpreted in the early church to be a ritual participating in the death and resurrection of Jesus.... a kind of sacramental re-birth. Unfortunately, it moved from being an affirming ritual into being invested with magical importance and if you didn't have that magical ritual your imaginary soul might be sent to an imaginary place of eternal torment.... Proving once again that organized religion can turn anything good into something absolutely neurotic and destructive. Let the people say, "Amen."
Many things that make perfectly good sense can become ritualized and institutionalized in a way that turns them into a meaningless religious burden and that is the sort of thing that we've been trying hard to get rid of in the emerging church. Some things we hold onto just because they are reflections of a tradition we love, the tradition through which we came to inherit a spiritual life. Most of those things are reinterpreted, to be sure, but we do not despise our own roots.
Baptism, Lent, the whole notion of penitence is suspect among progressives. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we were not the only progressive church in America that still has a prayer of confession in our liturgy every week.
I'm pretty sure that we're the only Progressive church in America that has a Gregorian psalm chant at the beginning of each worship service and we're one of the few that makes communion a weekly observance. But we are trying to affirm our roots when we can do so meaningfully, and simultaneously refusing to pass on that which is simply superstitious, neurotic or magical.
So, when it comes to something like baptism, you are not going to catch me mounting an argument either way. If the symbol is meaningful to you then I am all for it but if it is not, then I'm not going to expend any breath or energy defending it.
However, what it represents is, in my opinion, the real meat of the issue. The presumption that there is something in us that needs to be cleaned up... the suggestion that we need to die to an old way of living in order to be resurrected to a new way of living.... I'm not willing to give that up.
It seems evident to me that we all come into the world screaming and we're not screaming about unemployment, racism, environmental pollution or an unfair distribution of wealth. We come into the world screaming when we are unhappy. We naturally scream when we are hungry, tired, bored or wet. The problem is that a lot of what passes for human debate about politics is just not that different from the screams coming from the nursery at 2 a.m. The sound of a baby wanting a bottle and a rich person wanting a tax cut are made of the same primordial stuff.
To embrace a spiritual life is, in many ways, to do what the Buddha called "giving up the illusion of our separation from one another."
The spiritual life is unnatural in that it asks you to stop thinking about your own comfort, when you are hungry, bored, tired or wet and it asks you to grow in compassion, being able to feel the kind of wet a homeless person feels when it rains and their tent can't keep the water out of their bedding.
On Thursdays and Fridays when we take food to the homeless at Bill's Place, most of the time we have sandwiches wrapped up for them to take away with them for later. In our minds, the "take away" sandwiches are for their supper, or, even better, for them to give to someone they encounter who is hungry. But I'm going to estimate that 9 out of 10 of those sandwiches are eaten while they can still see our tail lights going down Commercial Street because, for the genuinely poor, there is no tonight.... There is not later.... They live in the moment.... A moment when they have no idea whether or not they will have a "later" and so we feed them a big hot meal and we give them a sandwich for later and they eat it as soon as they can get it down because their world is that uncertain. That's the kind of hunger that we who are well fed should scream about!
Because I am baptized, I no longer want to waste my breath screaming about how I want to be in a bigger house or drive a newer car or wear nicer clothes..... I want to scream about children living in cars.... I want to scream about the unemployed and the uninsured being denied the basic necessities of life.
I want to scream about Payday Loan shops making a profit off of the desperation of the poor. I want to scream about men in state legislatures wanting to stick electronic devices into the bodies of women who have come asking for an abortion just to humiliate them and hurt them some more.
I want to scream about using our military might to keep gasoline cheap while we sit back and watch tens of thousands die in a tortured Syrian genocide. I don't know that I need to baptize everyone in the world, but I know that I live in a world that is full of sin and darkness and the concept of repentance is not an antique ready for the trash heap.
During the dark days of apartheid in South Africa, Alan Boesak said to white church goers, "On judgment day you will stand before the Lord and he will ask you, 'Where are your scars?' And we will answer, 'We have none.' And he will ask us, 'Did you find nothing worth fighting for?'"
Men and women, if you are not shouting about the evil in our age, then you must not be paying attention because we have a lot that is worth fighting for.
